Tom McMahon

Only A Russian Could Have Made A Great Western Like The Magnificent Seven

Although he did a great job of keeping it secret, actor Yul Brynner was born in Vladivostok, Russia. From his son Rock Brynner's Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond :

No American film was ever so treasured and respected during the Soviet era, and that affection remains today. The Magnificent Seven became a national obsession in the USSR; people thronged to see the movie again and again. It was especially popular with teenage boys who, like Vladimir Putin, are today in their fifties and could recite every line of dialogue: after the first year, Soviet authorities prohibited children under sixteen from seeing The Magnificent Seven, reportedly because so many boys started shaving their heads. It was already a secular rite of passage for fathers to take their sons to see the film, and thanks to DVDs, that continues today. By now, The Magnificent Seven is more a part of the cultural heritage in Russia than it is in the United States. Recently, a renowned actor in the Moscow theater spoke to me with tears in his eyes, insisting that "only a Russian could have made a great western like The Magnificent Seven."

Brand New Misha Bears, Mascots Of The 1980 Moscow Olympics. Never Opened Or Played With. Because Of The US Boycott, These Bears Were Not Offered For Sale In 1979 And Have Been Stored For 31 Years! Just $40, While Supplies Last

Brand New Misha Bears, Mascots Of The 1980 Moscow Olympics. Never Opened Or Played With. Because Of The US Boycott, These Bears Were Not Offered For Sale In 1979 And Have Been Stored For 31 Years! Just $40, While Supplies Last

Video Recording Of The Burial At Sea Of Soviet Submariners Recovered During The CIA Project Jennifer, September 4, 1974 Onboard The Glomar Explorer

Video Recording Of The Burial At Sea Of Soviet Submariners Recovered During The CIA Project Jennifer, September 4, 1974 Onboard The Glomar Explorer

A fascinating Cold War story. The Wikipedia entry is a good place to start.

Why Democrat Frank Church Should Be Burning in Hell Right About Now

Larrey Anderson:

(The Church Committee, for example, conducted more than eight hundred interviews -- mostly with people involved in intelligence-gathering -- and produced more than 110,000 pages of documents. Almost all of the information gathered by both committees ended up in the hands of our adversaries.)

The reports, taken together, literally destroyed America's worldwide intelligence-gathering network. The Pike Committee report was so obviously and outrageously a threat to the intelligence community that even the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted against its publication. The report was nevertheless leaked to the media.

Within days of the release of the reports and documents, thousands of people sympathetic to the cause of freedom in communist countries around the world were arrested. Hundreds of people simply disappeared -- most of them were executed.

In the late 1970s, I worked for the Justice Department while I was in law school. I was able to meet some of the people mentioned in the documents -- and some individuals who knew the people rounded up by the communists as a result of the Church and Pike reports.

One of the close friends I made in D.C. worked with a U.S. intelligence agency[vii]. He had been a MIG fighter pilot for a communist country in Eastern Europe. One night, he snuck his wife and two young children to the airfield where he was stationed. He stripped a MIG fighter of all unnecessary weight. He stuffed his wife and two little kids onto the floor of the MIG.

He took off and headed west. He flew less than a hundred feet above the ground to avoid radar detection. He fled to the West with his family until the jet ran out of fuel. He landed in a farmer's field...just a few miles inside the border of a free European country. He had escaped communism with his entire family.

He was one of the men who told me what was happening (and had already happened) to the "informants" that had been identified by the KGB and other communist security organizations because of the Church and Pike reports. From my friend and other sources, I learned the names and locations of some of the American "sympathizers" who had managed to escape detection by the KGB.

In Appreciation and Dedication to Lt. Edwin Gorbet, USAF Who Sacrificed His Life In A Plane Crash On September 28, 1953 Saving The Lives Of Students At Jinks Junior High School And Area Residents

In Appreciation and Dedication to Lt. Edwin Gorbet, USAF Who Sacrificed His Life In A Plane Crash On September 28, 1953 Saving The Lives Of Students At Jinks Junior High School And Area Residents

The story:

Monday, Sept. 28--skies had cleared and life in Panama City returned to normal. At Tyndall AFB that morning, a pilot reported for for duty in preparation for a mid-day test-flight of his F86-D Sabre jet.

The pilot was 22-year-old 2nd Lt. Edwin Gorbet, son of a Long Beach, California firefighter. As a youth, Gorbet had been a stand-out high school athlete and a member of his church choir. He had been in the Air Force two years and was on temporary duty at Tyndall AFB to complete flight training.

Even so, while here Edwin became engaged to a local girl he'd met at the Cove Baptist Church, and sang gospel songs on a local radio station. At 12:07pm on that day, Gorbet climbed alone aboard his F86, pushed back the throttle, kicked in the afterburners, and pointed his jet skyward.

Within seconds he was airborne...but minutes later lights on the control panel began to flash. The air compressor had caught fire and fuel was leaking from the tank. Gorbet knew what this meant. To save his life he had to eject. Below, Gorbet could see the campus of Jinks Junior High School and the hundreds of students outside on school grounds, milling about on their lunch break.

Edwin Gorbet's last conscious decision was to not eject at that moment, but to stay with his doomed craft and attempt to steer it south over St. Andrews Bay. An instant later, when the jet's air-fuel mixture reached critical mass, the F86 exploded in mid-air and a huge fireball rained debris over hundreds of acres and rattled windows for miles.

The F86 missed the campus of Jinks Junior High, just as the young pilot must have prayed it would. Instead, the jet and the last remains of Edwin Gorbet came down on the grounds of the Panama City Garden Club, just paces from the spot of the club's planned memorial. ...

The Panama City News Herald, in stories over the next several days, hailed Gorbet's heroism, and a Garden Club member was quoted as saying that the name Edwin Gorbet would most certainly be added to the club's memorial.

And for over half a century, that's where the story ended.

Actually, that's just the first half of the story. Click for the rest of the story.

You're In The Ukrainian Army Now

You're In The Ukrainian Army Now

From EnglishRussia.com:

Looks like nothing has changed from Communistic times. Same old tradition to stand pants down before a group of lady doctors for every young man in the country.

A Cold War Flashback: Who Dealt This Mess?

A Cold War Flashback: Who Dealt This Mess?

From the glory days of National Lampoon

Why The Kids Never Learn About Pol Pot

From The Fourth Checkraise:

John Derbyshire, the cranky old paleo among the neocon crew of the National Review, is certainly my favourite writer in that outfit, plus his "Derb Radio" podcasts always lighten up the Friday afternoons considerably. He now has a new book out, aptly titled "We Are Doomed" which I would immediately put on hold at the library, if they had it... dang, I guess that will have to wait. Meanwhile, in his September diary Derb discovers that kids can go through the whole K-12 without learning about Pol Pot. Heh, really, Derb, this was news to you? I remember wondering about that exact same question like ten years ago. Of a random sample of one hundred high school seniors, I'd bet that 90 would know who, whom, where and when (within a decade) about Adolf Hitler, but only 50 could answer these questions about Joseph Stalin, and at most one or two would have even heard of the Old Pol from Sorbonne. Which is indeed strange... actually, no, it's not. This seeming paradox follows with crystal clear logic from the ideology that is currently dominant in humanities and education. To tell the kids why exactly Pol Pot was bad, unlike Hitler who can be easily associated with eugenics and highways and many other bad things that progressives dislike, they would have denounce most of their own ideology of anti-individualist equalism that this vanguard of the masses simply took to its logical conclusion.

Because The Whole Foods Crowd Doesn't Give A Damn About North Korea

An excerpt from Mark Krikorian:

I know it won't come as any surprise to Corner readers, but Monday's front-page Post story on the North Korean gulag highlights yet again how loathesome that gangster regime is. The reporter's point appears to be that the United States needs to take a stronger stance against the Reds' barbaric treatment of their subjects. The hypocrisy — or just shallowness and stupidity — of human rights types was nicely summarized by one activist: "Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney. North Koreans have no one like that."

And that's a big part of the problem with making human rights a central element of our foreign policy. It's inevitably going to be driven by the celebrity fad of the moment, whether Lord Byron and the Greeks in the 1820s, Hungary's Kossuth in the 1850s, or George Clooney today, and if a cause doesn't have a cute bumper sticker and catch the fancy of the Whole Foods crowd, it will be ignored.

After The American Left Caused and Then Ignored The Slaughters in Vietnam and Cambodia, That Was The Turning Point For Jon Voight

Jon Voight:

And then I saw the end of the war. I saw us pull out, and then I saw the communists move in and slaughter 2 1/2 million people in South Vietnam and Cambodia. And I saw the left that had precipitated this turn away, just walk away from it. ... They didn't take seriously the blood that they had been directly causing.

Do you think you'll ever see such an admission by James Rowen or Paul Soglin? I wouldn't wait for one.